Microscopic Machine Vision Based Degradation Monitoring of Low-Voltage Electromagnetic Coil Insulation Using Ensemble Learning in a Membrane Computing Framework

In this paper, a novel microscopic machine vision system is proposed to solve a degradation monitoring problem of low-voltage electromagnetic coil insulation in practical industrial fields, where an ensemble learning approach in a compound membrane computing framework is newly introduced. This membrane computing framework is constituted by eight layers, 29 membranes, 72 objects, and 35 rules. In this framework, multiple machine learning methods, including classical pattern recognition methods and novel deep learning methods, are tested and compared. First, the most optimal feature extraction approaches are selected. Then, the selected approaches are fused together to achieve an even better monitoring performance. Third, a large number of experiments are used to evaluate and prove the usefulness and potential of the proposed system, where a mean accuracy of 61.4% is achieved on 1035 validation images of six degradation states with single state matching, and mean accuracies of 61.0% and 77.4% are achieved on 622 test images of six degradation states with single state matching and state range matching, respectively. Finally, a mechanical device is designed to apply the system to real industrial tasks.